


Forever and Never

by GretchenSinister



Category: Rise of the Guardians (2012)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-16
Updated: 2019-12-16
Packaged: 2021-02-26 00:54:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 663
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21814747
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GretchenSinister/pseuds/GretchenSinister
Summary: Original Prompt: "Pitch and Jack are pretty ideologically opposite, when you get down to it. Even pre-guardianship. What I’d like to see is a fic where that really, really matters.They meet after Jack’s been alone for nearly a century, and they’re drawn to each other immediately. Nobody else (but the guardians) can see them, and they’re lonely. But they disagree-strongly-on what they’re supposed to be doing with their lives.Give me screaming arguments and one of them storming off in a fit of rage, snow days interrupted by sudden terror and nightmares cut short by a cold wind waking the children up. Ethical debates about what they do and why they do it. Months and years of silence between each other.Make them work for it, in other words. Jack and Pitch have to find a balance between themselves, and it’s not easy...[cut for length]"The more extensive the blackice prompt, the more concise my fill becomes (well, maybe–that’s just how I faced this one). Jack tells Pitch that if he exploits a certain fear, he’ll never speak to him again. Pitch doesn’t believe this, because they’re immortal. But Jack seems to really intent to make it stick.
Relationships: Jack Frost/Pitch Black
Comments: 7
Kudos: 45
Collections: Blackice Short Fics





	Forever and Never

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on Tumblr on 12/12/2015.
> 
> Here's the rest of the prompt: "I’d like it if Pitch isn’t the only one to change his behavior and ideas. Maybe Jack starts using his power in little ways to frighten children into being more careful in the snow?
> 
> +if Pitch pulls out the line about fear being necessary to keep children safe, not actually believing it at first, and eventually finds himself thinking it’s true just because he’s said it so many times.  
> ++ if Jack ever lays down a hard limit- ‘do that again and I won’t come back’ and means it.  
> +++if you can work in Jack having a subconscious fear of drowning"

_“…and I will never speak to you again,” Jack said._  
  
Of course Pitch hadn’t believed him. Forever and never were concepts and artifacts of human language, the only kind Jack knew how to use, and for immortals, they were nothing but laughable hyperbole. He’d made and broken enough forevers and nevers with other beings to know that well enough. And wasn’t he in the middle of a particularly long “never again” with some right now, which was why it had been so nice to meet Jack? And Jack was so young, and so lonely—how long could he stick to a forever?  
  
And so Pitch had cavalierly crossed the boundary Jack had set. The girl was afraid of drowning, and it wasn’t as though he wasn’t going to use that in her nightmares. At his core, he was a being of fear, and that couldn’t change—perhaps the only true never for him—no matter what Jack or the Guardians did or said.  
  
But it seemed that perhaps he had underestimated Jack. He had been only a hundred years old when Pitch had approached him for the first time, and he had been sure that they were drawn to each other with the kind of inevitability that made making declarations about forever and never entirely useless—Pitch knew plenty about _that_ –but it had been almost thirty years since Jack had left and made good on his ultimatum, and in that time, Pitch had heard nothing from him.  
  
He hadn’t heard from him, and he hadn’t seen anything of him, either. Not even brief, accidental glimpses, and even his other nevers allowed for that. The only thing that he could even perhaps think of as communication between him and Jack were a very few, odd moments where some children having nightmares had been awakened by unusually cold breezes. But in those moments, Jack hadn’t been around. Pitch had looked.  
  
Pitch followed the night on foot and skulked and sulked. How long was Jack intending to keep this up? How long could he? He had spoken of his years of loneliness as nearly unbearable, and there had only been a hundred of them. Now, out of sheer stubbornness, out of a refusal to acknowledge Pitch’s nature, he had endured a third of that again! How had he managed? Did he truly not want to see Pitch again? That girl from before—she was an adult now, and had children of her own, and none of them had drowned yet and none of them regularly got into situations where they _could_ and so what was the problem? Why couldn’t her fear be left alone? Why, wouldn’t every time she woke up and found out she wasn’t drowning make her feel more pleased to face the waking world again with all its trials? That hadn’t been the point of what he had been doing, but weren’t effects more important than intentions?  
  
Pitch thought of Jack’s smile, of how much easier it had grown the more time they had spent together, even though the frequency of their arguments had also grown rapidly at the same time. Jack wasn’t meant to be alone, that had been abundantly clear, even when he left. When would he come back? Who else was there for him? The Guardians? But they were always far too busy, and wouldn’t they be able to tell that Jack had been associating with Pitch? That would keep them away, wouldn’t it? Ah, but maybe not. A mere association, when he himself…and Jack was so likable, so appealing, and…and he just couldn’t have meant _never_ , even when he said it. No immortal could. And Pitch would wait. Let Jack figure that out for himself. Let him swallow his pride first and admit that he had acted like a fool, making something out of nothing.  
  
It couldn’t be much longer now. It couldn’t.  
  


* * *

  
  
“Jack Frost?” Pitch exclaimed in surprise, one hundred and seventy long years later.


End file.
